This is where America's young
consumers come in, in two phases. First by
creating the files-sharing sites which challenge
the majors' monopoly over content distribution;
second by organizing the response against the
transnationals' attacks. This situation
indicates a shift in the status of consumers.
They are becoming increasingly empowered not
only as consumers, illegally swapping products
intended for personal consumption, but also as
suppliers of content, offering their own
versions of various artistic works on the
Internet. They can now choose how to consume the
sounds and images available on the market and
what to do with them. The cliché of the passive
consumer no longer holds.

Fans
have always put sounds or images to uses not
necessarily forecast by their original creators
(cf, the pornographic parodies of famous
cartoons such as Popeye, Betty Boop or Superman
sold sub rosa during the 1930s); but computer
technology has enabled ordinary consumers to
compete on par with the industry. There is now
no limit, in terms of scope and quality, to what
one can do with cultural products, be it films,
videos, cartoons or music. Even Hilary Rosen,
the uncompromising president of the RIAA,
acknowledged the consumers' increasing power,
explaining how "in the future, the cycle [the
electronic industry selecting a format to which
labels would record, the consumers eventually
buying the end product] will be working backward.
Consumers will be dictating the business models,
and we'll be adopting them,"9 an opinion
echoed by Bertelsmann chief executive Thomas
Middelhoff at a press conference in New York:
"There's no question that files-sharing
will exist in the future as part of the media
and entertainment industry and there's no way to
deal with this fact (other) than to develop a
business model for files-sharing."

The transformation of the way popular
musics and images are consumed alters the nature
of popular culture itself. Let me briefly recall
a few concepts. Just as there is no culture in
general, popular culture cannot easily be
characterized by its essence or by a set of
intrinsic qualities or characteristics. Rather,
throughout the 20th century, popular culture has
been defined in terms of a dialectical
opposition to the dominant culture, the product
of inequality, difference, and conflict. It has
been described as resulting from a process of
appropriation of economic and cultural property
and from both symbolic and real reproduction and
transformation (Canclini 21). But since people
carry out these processes while participating in
the conditions of production, circulation, and
consumption of the system in which they live,
popular cultures are constituted within two
spaces: labor, family, media and communication,
i.e., the various activities through which the
capitalist system organizes the life of all its
members, and the practices and forms that
popular sectors create for themselves.

It
has been argued that such theories, which owe
much to Gramsci, put too strong an emphasis on
the opposition between subordinate and dominant
cultures, whereas they also combine and are
interdependent. It cannot however be denied that
the weight of media-originated culture is today
stronger than ever, imposing an unequal exchange
of material and symbolic goods, and the struggle
for the ownership and control of the means of
production has not abated. Thus, to the question
"do the categories developed for the
analysis of classical capitalism retain their
validity and their explanatory power when we
turn to the multinational and media societies of
today with their 'third-stage'
technologies?", Fredric Jameson answers
that "the persistence of issues of power
and control, particularly in the increasing
monopolization of information by private
business, would seem to make an affirmative
answer unavoidable" (xiii). Of course, the
labor theory of value, with its emphasis on
quantity (quantity of labor time particularly)
may be difficult to reconcile with the very
nature of cultural and informational commodities,
which represent mental rather than physical
products. Nevertheless, even the arguments
Daniel Bell uses to evidence the end of
capitalism, such as the primacy of science and
informational technologies, can be taken as
"indices of a new, original,
global expansion of capitalism"(xiv).

Culture
plays a key role in the expansion of capitalism.
If the social and economic structures of our
societies are to survive, each individual has to
assimilate as well as possible the social order
and the dominant ideologies while those in
control of the economy try to maintain the
consensus in order to protect their privileges.
This requires, in Foucault's analysis, the
ownership of the means of production and control
(the military, the police, schools, firms, the
media) by the ruling class.

Yet, generating consensus through training and
repression only can be dangerous. This is why
for Bourdieu the control of cultural
institutions is of paramount importance:
cultural policies legitimate the dominant
ideologies, adapt individuals to the economic
and political structures, while covering up the
violence the whole process requires. Cultural
power not only reproduces the sociocultural
order but also presents it as necessary and
natural, concealing the economic power on which
society rests and to whose maintenance it
contributes (Canclini 78).